Wellcome Trust Develops New Painkiller for Diabetes

Mon, 19 Jul 2010
The Wellcome Trust has allocated £3.8 million to a team of researchers at the University of Bristol to develop a new painkiller for the severe chronic pain related to diabetes .

There are presently few effective treatments for the pain.

The team leader, Professor of Molecular Medicine at the University of Bristol, David Wynick, will be working with the UK contract drug discovery company BioFocus and NeuroTargets to develop a new analgesic drug based on the protein galanin.

Neuropathic pain happens due to damage or injury to the nerve cells involved in sensing pain. It impacts upon 50 per cent of diabetics, and of those around 15-20 per cent will develop chronic pain.

Galanin is a protein made by nerve cells, produced in larger quantities when these cells are damaged.

After ten years of research looking at the effects of galanin, Professor Wynick has demonstrated that it lowers neuropathic pain in a number of animal models of disease, including diabetes .

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